Power consumption evaluation of hybrid WDM PON networks for data centers

As the requirements for processing power of the datacenters continues to increase rapidly, higher performance networks are required to sustain the increased communication bandwidth demand within the data center. Current data center networks cannot affordably satisfy the required bandwidth of emerging application without consuming excessive power. Optical interconnects provide a viable solution offering high throughput, reduced latency and reduced energy consumption compared to current networks based on commodity switches. This paper presents a novel hybrid approach that use commodity Ethernet switches for intra-rack communication and WDM PON for inter-rack communication. The proposed scheme is based on readily available, passive optical components devices, thus eliminating the power dissipated in Top-of-the-Rack switches for the inter-rack communication. The performance evaluation based on simulation shows up to 10% power reduction with negligible increase on the packet latency.